


no more monsters, i want to breathe again

by quixxotique (crownlessliestheking)



Series: i hope you find your peace [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternates and Past Memories that They Still Struggle With, Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Rose is a lil drunk, Thinking about the Alpha Guardians, This is essentially me taking a step back and purging my brain, introspective, stream of consciousness writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-08 05:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13451277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownlessliestheking/pseuds/quixxotique
Summary: There’s always that temptation there, to take just another sip. To pour out a martini in the middle of the day, let it sit bitter on your tongue so you’ll sleep, perchance to dream, perchance to meet her again, once upon a dream. It doesn’t make sense to you until you’re thirty-one, successful and published and fighting a fight that you know you’re going to lose but are praying you won’t. You didn't understand it when you were younger, didn't have name for that kind of longing, but you do now.





	no more monsters, i want to breathe again

**Author's Note:**

> Finally, some love for my Lalonde girls. This is painfully unedited and a lot shorter than my usual pieces.

It doesn’t make sense to you until you’re thirty-one, successful and published and fighting a fight that you know you’re going to lose but are praying you won’t.

Dave hoards Con Air memorabilia like some strange genus of dragon, but you? You have black lipstick that you started wearing when you were twelve, drawn to the shade as dark as the night. You have red scarves that you never wear, though you think that they would look good looped around the slim waist of another, like sash. You have ten shades of green lipstick that you never wear, each in a different shade of jade green, and none of them seem just right. You started reading trashy vampire romance novels when you were eight, because they were there, because something about them seemed familiar and that wasn’t escapism or even a guilty pleasure, but it’s the same reason you bought a sewing machine when you turned seventeen, your fingers almost raw as you tried, _tried_ to form scraps of cloth into a garment whose form eluded you.  You don’t realize that your home, large and empty and prepared for a child that you’ll never meet but think you love anyway, has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of things for someone else who simply isn’t there. Things that form an outline of what’s missing and some days, some days you’re so agonizingly close to seeing what it is, that last piece of the puzzle, but then you slide one way or another back to wakefulness and back to reality and it dissipates, ephemeral as smoke.

You are no closer to grasping it than you would be trying to catch the smoke with your bare hands, but you don’t know why until three decades later, and the knowledge feels like it’s crowded the breath right out of you.

A part of you thinks it’s a relief, to finally know why. To figure out that somewhere, this other version of you who played the game? She had _someone_. And another part of you resents her, that distant Rose who’s galaxies and light-years and impossible twists of time and space away, because why should she have what you can’t? Why does she have the person you’ve been missing, the one that’s just barely there, as a vague memory in your dreams, the brush of fingers against your cheek and a soft voice and a faint glow of light, like a star embodied?

You hate that you’re so bitter about it.

You don’t tell Dave, though. Oh, you tell him about the Game, about the kids that’ll be coming hundreds of years too late for you to do anything about and you see the relief and frustration war on his face, lined in ways he doesn’t want to admit and oh so _tired_ of this shitty, shitty world that you two are still fighting to keep. You told him about the Condesce, when you’d figured it out, and that took far more convincing. You told him what would happen, and showed him what was already happening, and the two of you did something about it, because who else would, if not you?

You’ve built a Rebellion together on the ashes of a hope you’d once ardently believed in. You know it’s what She would have wanted you to do, that it’s the right thing to do. And you know that it’s for those children that are going to come in the future.

Another thing you haven’t told Dave: You know you’re not going to succeed.

He believes it, despite everything- perhaps because there’s nothing else to cling to. Perhaps because even though there’s no one else that he can trust completely, not like you trust each other, he needs some blind promise of success that will keep him going, keep him fighting. You don’t like to admit that you’ve been deliberately vague about it. It’s not a deception that’s out of malice, but one out of necessity. It would break him, knowing that this was all for nothing.

And you know that your lying to him would be worse, because for all that your relationship with Dave is a bond deeper than any you’ve experienced in your life, for all that he pulls up walls and deflects with ironic nothings and long, rambling rants, you know that he feels the same. And despite that, it’s not- enough. It’s not what you need, there’s still pieces missing and it’s an incompleteness that _aches_ so deep. But that doesn’t matter, because he’s all you have. You’re all he has. And the two of you, just like always, will have to make do. Even if everything is going to be for nothing, even if you get the vaguest images of your Roxy and his Dirk growing up alone, isolated and hunted and wondering who put them there and why aren’t their guardians coming home?

You haven’t been wrong before, but this is something else for which you pray. You can’t be there for them, and neither can he (and you think that Dave might be secretly relieved by that, but that’s only because he thinks that he’s storing the apartment for a worst case scenario, because you’ve told him that there are some things you might not be able to stop, because he thinks Dirk is going to have someone else to take care of him), but you’ll be damned if you neglect to leave Roxy everything she needs.

You’ll clean out the alcohol, of course. The last chance you get to. Well- not all of it; there’s some that you’ll leave for disinfectants and other chemical uses. You know your girl is going to be absolutely brilliant, and with some of the machines down there? She’ll be able to use it for- something. Anything.

You don’t like to think about the memories from another Rose, of a mother who towers above you and whose breath reeks like a distillery, like the bottom of the bottles that you have scattered around. You don’t like to think of Roxy ending up like that, because of you. You don’t like to think of _yourself_ like that, being that drunken mother incapable of connecting with her child.

Of course, your memories aren’t complete. In this, as in everything, all you get are fragments. But these are enough for you to see the truth of the matter, as you always do.

When you were younger, you used to think of it as a gift, this sight of yours. Those dreams of things that weren’t real, but felt like memory, purified and distilled, solidified and then shattered so that you could only see fragments of the whole. Even when your adoptive parents had told you that it was nothing, had sent you to doctors upon doctors because ‘she’s seeing things that aren’t there, isn’t she too old for those sort of fairy tales and daydreams’, ~~because they were afraid of you and what you could see of them~~ , you had known that it was something else, something more. You had grown up telling yourself that you were born for something _more_ , to change the world and make it a better place.

What you hadn’t known is that you’d die in the effort. What you hadn’t known was that with it came a sort of crippling emptiness, where you’re all too aware of those slightest details that aren’t right. That you’d desperately wish that Alternia were still extant, that you could meet the trolls there, because you need to more than anything else- that’s where the missing thing is. Where your missing person is.

It’s different than the hollow ache you felt, watching the news at thirteen and seeing reports of SkaiaTech stocks plummeting and knowing that it was because the founder had died ~~been murdered~~. It’s different than being twenty-two and close friends with Dave, and holding him close as he cried into your shoulder as the news reported on John Crocker’s death without knowing _why_ , and feeling like you’d lost something too, that day. It’s different than telling him the truth, about everything, one year later. And watching him laugh in your face and calling you crazy, just like you used to be- you didn’t talk to him for three months, after that, but you’d mailed him a dossier thick with all the information. All of it irrefutable proof, and when he’d messaged you at three in the morning two nights later, the words smeared red and unfocused across your screen, you’d typed out your own response, and it had felt _right_ like things never did before.

You had your first drink at fifteen, and the liquor had seared itself into your throat with a burn that you hated but would soon learn to savor by twenty-one. You kept it under control, you told yourself. You’d never go out drunk, never let your parents see you until you were eighteen and free to go anyway, in college like the good girl they wanted to show off to the world

What you didn’t hate was how those things that were missing didn’t seem to matter anymore. What you didn’t hate was sometimes, if you drank enough, if you fell asleep and passed out and maybe burned the right herbs, you’d catch more than a fragment. You wouldn’t dream of a Kingdom in hues of purple, or of snatches of things to come. You’d dream instead of lips against yours, a cool hand resting in your heart, and a light like the flickering of a star, a body glowing against yours. You could hear a voice, soft and whispering words you didn’t understand then but now recognize as Alternian. You never needed to know the translation, though; you imagined that the tone was what love felt like, soft and lilting and if you were very lucky, on the tail end of a laugh.

There’s always that temptation there, to take just another sip. To pour out a martini in the middle of the day, let it sit bitter on your tongue so you’ll sleep, perchance to dream, perchance to meet her again, once upon a dream. You didn’t have a name for that kind of longing when you were younger, but at thirty-one? You know precisely what it is, even if you are still terribly young in the scheme of things.

You remember the things that would scrape claws against the edges of your mind when you were a child, before you were taught that monsters weren’t real, and before you realized that they were. Even now, you shudder to think about them, how they press too close when you write and carve deep into that pitch-drenched well inside you that you sometimes think of in Lovecraftian terms, where you got all your ideas as a teenager from. It was simpler then, your prose laughably weak and practically drenched in purple, all bleak darkness and the horror of things that lived beyond the universe, beyond the void, perpetually hungry. You don’t hear them when you drink, either, and that’s enough to have you refilling your glass now, raising it in a silent toast to them.

It’s the sort of mocking irony Dave pulls off with far less eloquence, but one that you do think you’re developing an appreciation for. Perhaps you should just ask him to hold a pillow to your face and end it now, really. You remember finding him, knowing that this mouthy boy from nowhere and nothing in Houston, Texas, was somehow  _yours_. Family, a bond that stretched thin but never splintered. He didn't believe you at first, and you still remember months of convincing him to meet in person, and finally doing it in a shabby diner in the middle of Oklahoma, because he didn't want to travel far from home, and you already had some of your parents' money, so why not? It was neutral ground that you both unfortunately despised. He'd shown up, shoulders tense and too tall for his jeans and too big for this space, all of nineteen and already against the world. He had shitty dollar-store aviators on, the kind with fake-gold rims that you had curled your mouth at, but hadn't said anything. Over terrible coffee and a too-greasy breakfast, you'd stared at each other in silence after he wolfed down his food. His table manners are still atrocious, but you suppose Hollywood is more forgiving than you are. He hadn't laughed in your face, then, only nodded once. Staccato and solemn, like he'd seen this coming. You'd had a faint flicker of hope that he might be like you in more ways than one, but- his abilities have never manifested himself as such. You almost envy that. But back then, you never would have expected him to be your closest friend, the only person on the entire planet that you would trust with everything that you are. You don't, of course, but you know that you could. 

Your laugh cuts through the silence in the room, brittle and piercings. It’s far from genuine, and it makes you wince, slightly.

So you get up instead, open the third drawer on your armoire, because that’s where you keep all Her things. And you’ll never admit it to anyone, that you can’t bear to have them out in the open, because that’s just too much of a reminder of what it is you don’t have and never will. Your fingers don’t shake as you pull out that long, red sash, curl the slippery silk around your fingers. Not even when you retrieve the stick of jade that looks closest to what it should be. You’ve long since stopped applying it to your own lips, as if you can feel hers against them- it doesn’t suit your complexion, and in the end, it’s just lipstick. A waxy sheen over your mouth that Dave says makes you look like you’ve been eating Shrek salad, in a particular turn of vulgarity. But you keep it close still, even as you settle onto the bed, your thumb stroking at the cap.

You sigh, softly, and the exhalation fills the room. Your knitting lies cast aside, the careful purple-striped pattern abandoned for now, the last few rows incomprehensible knots that you’ll have to undo in the morning, with clumsy, hungover fingers. Maudlin like this gets you nowhere, and there is still work to be done. So much, and so little time, and you want so _badly_ to be wrong about this, about everything.

You want to be wrong about knowing that you and Dave will both die three years from now, just weeks shy of your thirty-fifth birthdays. You want to be wrong about knowing that she’s going to flood the Earth and everything you fought for, everyone you fought with, will drown or bleed out as she makes an example of them. You want to be wrong about how juggalos taking up a faith that aren’t theirs will stalk the streets, executing a justice that will eventually turn on them, too. You want to be wrong about how your children are going to grow up, never knowing their parents or any other humans, but you take solace in knowing that they’re both going to be brilliant, and you pretend like that’s enough. You want to be wrong about how you’re never going to meet Her, not even after you die, because not even you know what’s beyond this. You want to be wrong about how she’s never existed in this universe, not in the same way that she does with the other Rose, about how your time and place are never going to match up with hers.

But you know you’re not, and wanting has never done anything for you. But you'll fight for this anyway, because it's who you are in this world. Because you need to, because what else is left if you don't?


End file.
